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What if the dearth of mobile advertising is not because of Facebook’s failure but because the opportunity is not really there?

There’s a $60B bet on the table that Facebook can monetize its user traffic. (It was a $100B wager at Facebook’s IPO, but things have not gone well since.) The conventional wisdom is that this bet will pay off only if Facebook can crack the code on mobile advertising. That’s because much (and ever more) of Facebook’s user traffic comes via mobile platforms, and mobile advertising is seen as a huge revenue opportunity.

Similar bets are in play for other companies, such as Google, Twitter and Yahoo. There’s no question about whether these companies will attract mobile users. Their market values, however, will depend on how well they translate mobile traffic into advertising dollars.

The belief that there is a huge opportunity in mobile advertising stems from a straightforward projection, as captured in this slide from Mary Meeker’s recent Internet Trends presentation:

Source: KPCB

The slide suggests that U.S. advertising spending on mobile platforms is much lower than it should be, given mobile usage. Meeker calculates that mobile’s fair share of advertising spending in the US should have been about $20B, rather than the $1.6B actually registered last year. She sees the disparity as an indicator of upside potential.

In this [mobile] era the essential unit of advertising (a page based ad, whether text, display or anything else) is simply the wrong monetization vehicle. Something new has to emerge.

But the conventional wisdom (as represented by Facebook’s still hefty 70+ trailing price-to-earnings ratio and $60B market value) is that, as Teare recently wrote, it is likely that “Facebook (and Google) know well what the problems are and will figure them out in time.”

Others, however, think that Facebook is not up to the challenge. Eric Jackson, of Ironwood Capital LLC and a Forbes contributor, believes Facebook is facing disaster because it does not have mobile in its founding DNA. As a result, he writes:

No matter how smart Zuckerberg is, and how many cool mobile apps he buys, history also shows he’ll miss that one that will eventually grow to outshine Facebook – just as Yahoo missed out on the opportunity to buy Facebook and went on to be eclipsed by it.